Woven tubular flat and round shoe laces have been available for a great many years. See, for example, Daniels et al. U.S. Pat. No. 1,804,211, issued May 5, 1931. Workers in the art have over the years devised a number of modifications for maintaining lacing snugness on the shoe and at the tie knot area of the lace to provide an anti-slip lace. Examples of such laces are seen in Taft U.S. Pat. No. 2,141,801, issued Dec. 27, 1938 (spaced internal beads disposed inside the tubular lace); Wright U.S. Pat. No. 2,306,515, issued Dec. 29, 1942 (raised surface areas provided by staples and an internal stiffening member adjacent the lace ends); Stapleton U.S. Pat. No. 2,477,151, issued Jul. 26, 1949 (a stand of material woven back and forth through the lace); Lester U.S. Pat. No. 2,639,481, issued May 26, 1953 (spaced protuberances formed by weaving lengths of thread through the lace along its length); Nelson U.S. Pat. No. 3,059,518, issued Oct. 23, 1962 (braided elastic strands); Brumlik U.S. Pat. No. 4,247,967, issued Feb. 3, 1981 (male and female "Velcro" hook and loop strips along opposite ends of the lace); and German Patent No. 557,418, issued Aug. 23, 1932 (a strip of material painted or printed along the length of the lace).
Still another approach is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,518,730, issued Jul. 7, 1970, where a monoform lace has an abrasive grit within the binder to provide a roughened surface finish.
More recently, a commercial lace product produced by Nobbits, Inc. of Rockford, Ill., the assignee of this application, has blobs of an acrylic paint applied in spaced intervals along one side or alternating on opposite sides of a flat tubular woven lace. Such laces do provide the desired latching functions with eyelets or hooks on shoes or other wearing apparel items and the laces also provide a distinctive appearance or looks particularly when the paint blobs are a contrastingly or differently colored material from that of the laces themselves.
The Nobbits.RTM. brand laces are most commonly 9 mm flat woven material such as polyester, nylon, cotton or blends with an acrylic paint blob applied to the exterior surface in spaced intervals, preferably in an alternating manner of disposition on opposite sides of the laces. The laces are preferably provided with an aglet at each end.
Despite the existence of the aforementioned lace constructions disclosed in prior patents and the commercially available Nobbits latching laces, it is desirable to provide a round lace which appears conventional, but yet still has the benefits of such laces insofar as the latching feature is concerned.